[metapost] METAFONT: Calligraphic font

[Laurence Finston]

It seems to me that people interested in MF would most likely be found on this mailing list, as opposed to, say, comp.text.tex, so I'm posting this here.  I hope that's alright.

For a prospective TUGboat article I dug out my first project in MF/MP from the 90's.  It's a calligraphic font based on an Old Icelandic manuscript, namely Holm perg 11 4°:  https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?i1717163
It was intended to imitate the forms of the glyphs in the manuscript as closely as possible, not to create an attractive calligraphic font.

I've uploaded the sources to a GitHub repository, in case anyone feels like having a look:  
https://github.com/lfinston/Mariu
git at github.com:lfinston/Mariu.git

I plan on looking up the criteria for CTAN projects and will make a package out of these materials and upload it, if appropriate.

I've attached two PDF files to this message:  mariu_drawings.pdf, which contains my drawings at their original size (DIN A4, 210 X 297mm), and mariu_test.pdf, which includes an example of the MF font.

The tricky part was working around a limitation of MF:  As everyone here probably knows, MF allows for penstrokes that simulate a pen that can change the angle and/or the width during a stroke, but the edges can't cross, on the one hand, or for pens of fixed width and angle that can be used for paths that do cross, on the other.  However, the pens used for calligraphic scripts like this one require pens of fixed width and variable angle and paths often cross.  The crossing points were the most difficult part to program.  In addition, MF's idea of a "pleasing curve" is very different from the requirements of this font, so that I made a great deal of use of "tension" in the paths.

Laurence
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